Introduction

How does a museum tell the stories of a place? Does it tell its stories differently to local inhabitants and to an outsider audience? Like a piece of literature, a museum can be intimately connected with its own city through narratives, images, and symbols. But curatorial practice and exhibition simultaneously involve the processes of contextualisation and de-contextualisation. For example, a historic city with a long tradition and rich cultural heritage would endow a museum with a great assemblage of objects and texts to materialise an otherwise abstract past. By removing the things from their original contexts and rearranging them in new ways of visual display and perceptions, modern museological practice can contribute to forging individual and collective understanding of a place and its varied identities in past, present, and future.

Yet, to speak of a museum that intrinsically creates an aura of place or ‘home’ can be a paradoxical statement in itself. The sense of place is customarily understood as a humanistic ideal. For Yi-fu Tuan (1977), ‘place’ is a fundamental concept in humanistic geography that emphasises human subjectivity and experience rather than the hard logic of spatial science. Tuan defines place attachment as how people relate on an emotional and perceptual level to the places that they inhabit. He coined the term ‘topophilia’ (literally ‘love of place’) to explore the affective bonds between people and settings, environmental perception, attitudes, and value.